I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake
Asleep in my father’s apartment, I dream that someone is at the door. It’s him—he is three, or maybe four, years old. He’s crying; I don’t know why, only that he is bitterly disappointed. I try to distract him by showing him a picture book with beautiful illustrations, in colors far brighter than those one gets in life. He glances at the book, but carries on anyway. In his eyes I see that everything has already been decided. So instead I pick him up and carry him around on my hip. It isn’t easy, but that’s how it has to be, because he’s so upset, this tiny father-child.
The latch of the front door awakens me. I’ve been living here alone for more than a week. Now, lying still, I listen to the sound of footsteps entering, and a bag being set heavily on the floor. The footsteps move away, toward the small kitchen, and I hear the creak of the cabinet open and close. The sound of water rushing from the tap. Whoever it is knows his way, so there is no one it can be.
From the bedroom doorway I see the stranger’s broad, stooped back. It takes up half the tiny kitchen. He gulps down a glass of water, fills it again, drains that one, and a third. Then he rinses the glass and places it to dry, upside down, on the rack. He’s sweated through his white shirt. He unbuttons the sleeves and rolls them to the elbows. He splashes his face with water, removes the checked dishcloth from the peg, dries himself brusquely, and stops to press the towel into his eyes. From his back pocket he produces a small comb and runs it through his hair, smoothing it into place. When he turns, his face is not the face I expected, although there was no face I was expecting. This face is old and refined, with a long nose and high, flared nostrils. His eyes are hooded, but surprisingly light and nimble. He walks the few steps back into the living room, tosses his wallet on the table, and only then, looking up, does he notice me watching him from the doorway.
My father is dead; he died two months ago. At the hospital in New York I was given his clothes, his watch, and the book he’d been reading as he ate alone at the restaurant. I searched his pockets for a note to me, first the pants and then the raincoat. Finding none, I read the book, about legal theory and Maimonides. I couldn’t make sense of the words. I had not prepared myself for his death. He had not prepared me. My mother died when I was three. We had already dealt with death, in our way we’d agreed to be finished with it. Then, without warning, my father broke our agreement.
A few days after the shiva, Koren brought me the keys to the apartment in Tel Aviv. I hadn’t known there was anything that belonged to my father there. In the five years before he died, he had taught the winter semester in Israel, in the city where he grew up. But I always assumed that he lived in rooms loaned to him by the university, the sort of spare, impersonal place visiting academics are always given, which have everything and nothing: salt in the cupboard, but never olive oil; a knife, but a knife that doesn’t cut. He told me almost nothing about where he lived between January and May. But he was not secretive about it. I knew, for example, that he stayed in the center and commuted to the campus in Ramat Aviv three times a week because he preferred the city, and that the apartment where he stayed was not far from the sea, where he liked to walk in the early morning. When we spoke on the phone, as we often did, and he told me about the concerts he attended, the dishes he had tried cooking, and the book he was writing, I never pictured his surroundings on the other end of the line. And when I tried to recall those conversations, it seemed to me that there was nothing beyond the sound of my father’s voice: it absorbed even the need to imagine.
And yet there was Koren, with the keys to the apartment I hadn’t known of. It was Koren, the executor of my father’s will, who’d taken care of the funeral arrangements; I had only to be present when they lowered him into the ground, to add the first shovel of dirt. The hollow thud it made on the pine casket made my knees buckle. Standing in the cemetery in a dress too heavy for the warm weather, I remembered the one time I’d seen him drunk. He and Koren had sung so loudly it had woken me up: Chad gadya, chad gadya. One little goat, one little goat. The dog came, and bit the cat, that ate the goat, that my father bought for two zuzim. Once my father told me that the Torah contained no mention of the everlasting soul—that the soul as we know it came along only in the Talmud, and, like all technological advances, it made things easier but cut people off from something that had once been native to them. What was he saying? That the invention of the soul made people strangers to death? Or was he instructing me not to think of him as a soul once he was gone?
Koren copied the address onto the back of his business card and told me that my father had wanted me to have the apartment. Afterward, as we stood in the fluorescent-lit hall waiting for his elevator, sensing, perhaps, that he had not adequately conveyed some message, Koren added, “He thought it was someplace you might go sometimes.”
Why? Why, when all these years I’d never visited him there, nor had he ever invited me? I had cousins in the north of the country but was rarely in touch with them; their mother, my father’s sister, was nothing like him. My cousins are hard, practical, unsparing people. Now they already have children of their own whom they let run freely in the street, playing with sharp and rusty things. I admire them but don’t know how to speak to them. After my grandmother died, when I was ten, I’d only gone back once. There was no longer any reason to go. As if something had been decided, my father gave up speaking to me in Hebrew. I’d been answering him in English for years, and so I hardly noticed, but later I came to sense that the language he still dreamed in was an argument he had lost with someone else, not me.
Now when the stranger in my father’s apartment speaks to me, I answer reflexively in English: “I’m Adam’s daughter. Who are you?”
“You surprised me,” he says, clapping his chest. He sinks down onto the sofa, his knees falling open.
“You’re a friend of my father?”
“Yes,” he says, rubbing his throat under the open collar. The hair on his chest is sparse and gray. He gestures for me to sit, as if it were I who had appeared unannounced in his living room, and not vice versa. With shining eyes, he takes me in. “I should have guessed, you look like him. Only prettier.”
“You didn’t say your name.”
“Boaz.”
My father had never mentioned a Boaz.
“I’m an old friend,” the stranger says.
“Why do you have the keys?”
“He lets me use the place when he isn’t here. Now and then, when I come through the city. I stay in the back bedroom, and check on things for him. Last month there was a leak from upstairs.”
“My father died.”
For a moment he says nothing. I can feel him studying me.
“I know.” He stands up, turning his back to me, and easily lifts the heavy bag of groceries he’d set down earlier. But instead of leaving, as I expect—as any normal person would—he retreats to the kitchen. “I’m making something to eat,” he says without turning. “If you’re hungry, it’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
From the living room I watch him nimbly chopping the vegetables, cracking the eggs, and rummaging in the refrigerator. It annoys me to see him making himself so at home. My father is gone, and yet this stranger intends to take advantage of his hospitality. But I haven’t eaten all day.